AGE OF CONSENT Sue de BeerWendy Coburn

Kyla MallettLeslie Peters

Rebecca Fin SimonettiTobias Yves Zintel

April 14 – May 12, 2012Opening Reception: Saturday April 14, 2-5PM

Doris McCarthy Gallery

Free shuttle bus for the opening departs 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto, at 2PM, returning at 5PM

Curated by Talia Linz

AGE OF CONSENT

Teenagers are highly visible and highly mythologized agents of contemporary western culture.This demographic is targeted earlier and earlier as consumers, sexual beings and biocapital,with the mass media and advertisers in particular appealing to and exploiting the teenagedrive to both conform and individualize.As Anita Harris notes:“It is primarily as consumercitizens that youth are offered a place in contemporary social life.”1 The growing presenceand power of youth and the deluge of fears and anxieties around their behaviours, desires,and choices, have been reflected in and influenced by popular culture.Artists, musicians andfilmmakers provide us with a cultural lineage of “misbehaving” teens, from the idiosyncraticfilms of John Waters to the recent Twilight series. Ideas of play, excess and experimentationfigure large, as does the negotiation of systems of authority and the development and projectionof self-identity. Age of Consent brings together the work of six Canadian and internationalartists who look at adolescence in various forms, exploring experiences (real and projected),perceptions (internal and external), myths, dreams and desires connected to this demographicand this time of life.

Leslie Peters’s 100 Prince Charles Drive uses source footage from the day before the artist’ssixteenth birthday, the very first time she used a video camera. Peters and a friend take onand switch between the roles of director and performer, reveling in the play of power enabledby the then-newly affordable domestic technology.We see the seductiveness of performingfor each other before the lens and the boldness permitted by its mediating role.We witnessPeters being and “performing” a sixteen year old, misbehaving and taunting the camera withpracticed smoke rings and “up yours” gestures. The artist revisits this moment from heradolescence with time slowed, looped and made non-linear, revealing the human compulsionto understand the present through the past, and to re-inhabit and re-imagine our younger days.

Historically, the teenager is a relatively new cultural phenomenon that came into being atthe turn of the last century, tied in with urbanization and a rapidly changing economy. It could

LESLIE PETERS 100 Prince Charles Drive, 2005, video, 11 min. Courtesy the artist and Vtape, Toronto.

be argued that our current consumer society is based in effect on a teenage sensibility—a perpetual present characterized by a flippant next-thing mentality populated by adultswho can’t,or won’t,grow up.Certainly a quick survey of mainstream television or hit box officefilms would indicate this trend.Teenagedom is often conveyed (and at times experienced) asflanked by compulsions of socialization and anti-socialization, and much of its representationswings between these poles. So teens are both violent and vulnerable, highly sexualized andinnocents needing protection;bored,apathetic and unproductive while also the key to the future.

Being “young” is generally equated with inexperience and uninformed naiveté, and consequentlyteens are pitched as questionable in the knowledge and articulation of themselves. BothNew York-based Sue de Beer and Berlin-based Tobias Yves Zintel work with teen performersand collaborators to create compelling, fantastical films.Zintel’s Neverland Rising, 2010,mixesmusic, dance and theatre to look at themes of growing up and self-identity in a surrealisticmash-up where subconsciousness and reality are equal partners. De Beer employs space as ametaphor for psychological or emotional terrain.Her works are often filmed in theatrical setsof teenage bedrooms—that iconic sphere that signifies both safety and confinement—and drawon a range of youth culture references from stuffed animals and figurines to signifiers ofgrunge and gothic subcultures. Along with her 2005 video piece Black Sun, included inAge of Consent are a selection of De Beer’s photographs that riff off the gratuitousimagery of horror movies and speak to the media sensationalization of teenage violencethat haunts the North American collective consciousness.

With their melancholic and diaristic quality, Rebecca Fin Simonetti’s drawings could decoratethe walls of a teenage girl's bedroom. Her personal inventory employs animal totems suchas lambs and horses, frequently associated with girlhood.The girls in her pictures are mostoften alone or accompanied by these animals—both lifelike and in various states of dyingor inanimation—summoning a place not quite real and not quite imaginary, but hoveringbetween the two. Her work deals obliquely with desire and longing, looking at the difficultyof social relations, of searching for a communion with self and with others.

A particular focus within this exhibition is the notion of girlhood, its role as cultural capital,and how it relates to contemporary feminisms and the construction of femininity in westernculture.Wendy Coburn explores the imaginary of a young girl that sees her desire reflectednowhere on earth. Untitled (girl & dog) depicts a dangerous ambiguity when innocent youthfulplay may become proscribed as an act of deviant sexuality. Kyla Mallett’s photographs ofnotes passed between schoolgirls magnify an often devalued social practice, honouring itsunique coloured-pen language of adolescent love and frustration.These works present girlhoodas a “contradictory rather than coherent subject” in an effort to “understand the ‘girl’ not asa singular state defined by age or behaviour, but as a constantly shifting, discursively constitutedsign that comes to mean and represent many things besides ‘young female.’”2

For all the artists, the question of the adult spectator (and creator) begs interrogation.Theseyouthful representations must be, after all, the projection of adult fantasies and desires—idealized,sentimentalized, regretful, abandoned. They tap into the connection between temporalityand adolescence,which is often framed as emblematic of the liminal, a transitional phase to movethrough to achieve a more stable state of being. Coming-of-age tropes of awakening,blossoming or maturing mark many teenage narratives, regularly accompanied bypersonal/sexual/social/moral enlightenment. In this regard, adolescence stands as an allegoricalstate, allowing for a level of instability in regards to self-identity.

Queer theorists provide useful frameworks to think about time, applying queerness as anon-normative methodological approach that is not limited to sexuality in a narrow sense.Elizabeth Freeman writes of the “chronopolitics of development,”3 referencing the internaland external pressures associated with the passing of time, unpacking the idiomatic directiveto “grow up” that is tied to perceived productivity, itself linked to capitalist values of so-calledprogress and profit.This conception of queering time challenges the assumption of a linear,“correct” path of development.Tim Dean discusses the concept of becoming through whathe terms a queer notion of futurity:“As a ceaseless movement of being that is not coordinated

by teleology or development, becoming never results in anything resembling an identity.”4 Sothere is something in the works in Age of Consent that celebrates wading in the uncomfortableunknowing of adolescence, and asks how this paradigmatic period shapes the formation ofthe self and continues to inform adult subjectivity. The artists included are interested inlooking at the hinge between then and now, allowing for a fluid movement back and forth.In The Queer Child, Kathryn Bond Stockton writes of growing sideways instead of up becauseit suggests that “the width of a person’s experience or ideas, their motives or their motions,may pertain at any age, bringing ‘adults’ and ‘children’ into lateral contact of surprising sorts.”5

TALIA LINZ

KYLA MALLETT See ya!, 2004, lightjet print, 40 x 31 inches, edition of 2. Courtesy the artist and Torys LLP.

1 Anita Harris, “Jamming Girl Culture:Young Women and Consumer Citizenship,” in All About theGirl: Culture, Power, and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2004), 163.2 Jennifer Eisenhauer,“Mythic Figures and Lived Identities: Locating the ‘Girl’ in Feminist Discourse,”in Harris, All About the Girl, 87.3 Elizabeth Freeman, “Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography,” in Social Text:What’s Queer About QueerStudies Now, 84-85 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 59.4 Tim Dean, “An Impossible Embrace: Queerness, Futurity, and the Death Drive,” in James J. Bono,Tim Dean and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, eds., A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy(New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 135.5 Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham:Duke University Press, 2009), 11.

SUE DE BEER Sasha La Rosa, 1999, c-print, 50 x 40 inches. Courtesy the artist and Michael Clifton.

SUE DE BEER is a graduate of Columbia University and Parsons The New School for Design, New York.She has exhibited nationally and internationally in such venues as the New Museum, the WhitneyMuseum of American Art, MoMA PS1, the Brooklyn Museum, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, the ReinaSofia, Madrid, and the Museum of Modern Art, Busan. De Beer’s work is in the permanent collectionsof MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Goetz Collection,Munich. De Beer lives and works in New York and is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery, New Yorkand Christian Ehrentraut Gallery, Berlin.

WENDY COBURN is a Toronto-based artist and educator. Coburn studied at the Dundas Valley School ofArt, Ontario College of Art, and holds an MFA from Concordia University. Coburn currently teachessculpture and interdisciplinary courses at OCAD University and is a Fellow at the Mark S. BonhamCentre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Coburn’s work has been exhibitedand screened nationally and internationally in galleries and festivals including Photophobia, ArtGallery of Hamilton; The Living Effect, Ottawa Art Gallery; MIX: The New York Gay & LesbianExperimental Film/Video Festival;Transmediale International Media Art Festival, Berlin; Uneasy Pieces,Oakville Galleries; Kassel Documentary Film & Video Festival; and the Dublin Lesbian & Gay Film andVideo Festival.

KYLA MALLETT completed her MFA at the University of British Columbia in 2004, after attaining herBFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2000. Her work consistently deals with the intersectionof language and the social realm, utilizing pseudo-anthropological strategies of research, collecting andarchiving. She has exhibited at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, Vancouver Art Gallery,Presentation House Gallery, Artspeak, ThreeWalls in Chicago, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, and isincluded in the upcoming group exhibition Tools for Conviviality at The Power Plant,Toronto. Mallett isan Assistant Professor in Visual Art and Graduate Studies at Emily Carr University.

Toronto-based artist LESLIE PETERS has been working in video and multi-channel installation for thepast 15 years. Her work has been exhibited internationally including exhibitions in the UK, Germany,Spain, Switzerland, Australia, Peru, Egypt and Italy. In Canada, Peters’s work has shown in screeningsand festivals as well as in galleries including The Power Plant, the National Gallery of Canada,Oakville Galleries, Dunlop Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Peters’s work is distributedby Vtape,Toronto.

Born in Vancouver in 1985, REBECCA FIN SIMONETTI graduated in 2009 from OCAD University witha BFA in Drawing and Painting. Simonetti translates her installations, music and performances intoworks on paper and canvas. She has received numerous awards across mediums, including the DonnaMacLean Award and the Eric Freifeld Award for painting. Her work in film has garnered internationalacclaim, including Best Experimental Film at Cascadia, and Best Drama at Burbank International. Mostrecently, Simonetti has been featured in CACTUS and Offerings and spent much of the past year inBaltimore where she presented her fourth solo show Are They a Threat.

WENDY COBURN Untitled (girl and dog), 2001, plastic, edition of 12. Courtesy the artist.

TOBIAS YVES ZINTEL was born in 1975 in Passau, Germany. From 1996 to 2002, he studied at theCatholic University of Eichstätt and LMU Munich. From 2002 to 2007, he was a student of JosephKosuth at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. Zintel works with photography and video in the junctionbetween music, performance, theatre, video and art. His work has been screened at the CentrePompidou in Paris, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and the Reina Sofia in Madrid as part ofRencontres Internationales 2008, and his 2010 solo exhibition Acid and Ice Cream was held at Honor FraserGallery, Los Angeles.Zintel lives and works in Berlin and is represented by Barbara Gross Gallery,Munich.

Originally from Sydney,Australia, TALIA LINZ is currently based in Toronto where she is undertaking acollaborative Masters in Curating and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She holdsa BA in Performance Theory and Practice from the University of Western Sydney and an MA inWriting from the University of Technology, Sydney. She is an independent writer, former executiveproducer of arts and culture at FBi Radio 94.5FM and former assistant editor of the quarterly journalArt & Australia.

REBECCA FIN SIMONETTI Red Porter, 2011, ink on paper, 13 x 14.5 inches. Courtesy the artist.

REBECCA FIN SIMONETTI Caduceus, 2011, ink on paper, 14 x 17.5 inches. Courtesy the artist.

Doris McCarthy GalleryUniversity of Toronto Scarborough1265 Military TrailToronto, ON, M1C 1A4T: 416-287-7007

www.utsc.utoronto.ca/dmg

GALLERY HOURSWednesday to Friday 10-4pmSaturday 12-5pm

The gallery is wheelchair accessible.

GALLERY STAFFAnn MacDonald, Director/CuratorErin Peck, Exhibitions & Outreach Coordinator Katrina Enros, Gallery AdministratorJessica Thalmann, Gallery Assistant

DIRECTIONSThe Doris McCarthy Gallery is located on the upper level of theAcademic Resource Centre at The University of Toronto Scarborough.

BY CARFrom Toronto, take Highway 401,exit at Morningside Ave.southbound,then turn eastbound onto Military Trail.BY TTCFrom York Mills Subway, take bus 95/95B/95E/95F.From Scarborough Town Centre, take bus 38.

COVER IMAGE TOBIAS YVES ZINTEL, Neverland Rising, 2010, HD video,31 min. Courtesy the artist.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSTalia Linz would like to thank the artists Sue de Beer, WendyCoburn, Kyla Mallett, Leslie Peters, Rebecca Fin Simonetti andTobias Yves Zintel for their beautiful work, insight, and generosity;Barbara Fischer for her inspiring wisdom and infinite guidance; AnnMacDonald, Erin Peck and Katrina Enros for all their hard work andprofessionalism; Rebecca Gimmi and Christopher Régimbal for theirinvaluable help and advice; the curatorial committee for their timeand enthusiasm—Christof Migone, Ihor Holubizky, Ann MacDonald,Richard Hill, Lisa Steele, and especially Jessica Wyman for her eruditeinput; Claire Christie for her design prowess; Deidre Logue, ErikMartinson and Vtape; Annie Rana and Marianne Boesky Gallery;Catriona Jeffries Gallery; Hannah Dyer; Doug Stone; Sue Lloyd andthe VIS 2002 class for the thought-provoking discussions;and WandaNanibush and Eric Woodley for being such wonderful colleagues.

A special thank you for the kind support of lenders Michael Clifton,Guy Knowles, Alex McLeod, and Torys LLP, and for the generouscontributions from the Centre for the Study of the United States,Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto; The Mark S.Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University College,University of Toronto; The Department of Germanic Languagesand Literatures, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto; andScarborough Paint Centre.

This exhibition is produced as part of the requirements for the MVSdegree in Curatorial Studies at the University of Toronto.

BROCHURE DESIGN Claire ChristiePRINTED BY Captain Printworks

© Doris McCarthy Gallery, the author, and the artists, 2012.

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